“If I Turn into a Boy, I Don't Think I Want Huevos”: Reassessing Racial Masculinities in What Night Brings

Carla Trujillo's novel What Night Brings, set in the mid- to late 1960s, critiques Chicano cultural nationalist narratives for too easily entangling racial emasculation with economic exclusion and domestic violence. Considering how this critique of male violence can also be appropriated by the state, I contemplate how we might read differently to find alternative ways to analyze family-centered politics that enable us to “disidentify” with the state and delegitimate its monopoly on violence.